Olafur Eliasson + BMW = Overblown Onanism
| November 25th, 2007
A trip to the SF Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) this past Friday gave me a chance to finally enter that big freezer installation they put in a few months back. The top floor is dedicated to Olafur Eliasson’s work with space, light, and geometric forms. I find his work can typically be described by my favorite adjectives: simple and deep. A particular favorite of mine was the room where the elevators emptied into the top floor, and a half dozen sickly orange flourescent lights had been installed. The effect was overwhelming and striking: everything came out orange, and the light dried up your eyes.
But the refrigerated piece on the second floor is what sent V, myself and her brother Q reeling with philosophical discussion. In the end, I had to agree that it was, in fact, art. But I still feel somewhat polluted by the piece.
Said piece is “Your Mobile Expectations” and the whole overblown sheebang was sponsored by BMW. Now, traditionally, art does not have to offer function. Art is something new, something expressive, something never before done or seen. By those definitions, Your Mobile Expectations is certainly art.
But I feel that the piece is bad art. Very bad art. I don’t see anything in it that holds merit. Eliasson is an accomplished artist, no doubt, but the ice sculpture shown at the SF MOMA does nothing for me. I wouldn’t have liked it much if I hadn’t read all the stuff written on the walls outside the freezer. But after I read all of that, I downright hated the piece.
It all began when BMW gave Eliasson the chasis for one of its hydrogen powered super cars. Eliasson was asked to make art out of it. So he made a serated half-football, and covered it in icicles. In effect, it’s a big fat BMW ad. I understand Eliasson has to make a living, and that his ice art isn’t easy to work with, display or create outside of his native Iceland.
But the SF MOMA owes use a better piece of ice art. Eliasson’s cost are considerable for materials and the facilities for display, but to offset them with the BMW cash, for me, removes all the artistic value for the piece. Constraints on art are like standards for feces.
Especially if those constraints are around a product or a brand. Warhol’s soup cans would have had no meaning beyond advertising if the Campbell’s people had commissioned the works. Two galleries over, there is a Dali sculpture built around a red shoe. I’d have poo-poo’ed it if Dali’d been paid to make it. Likewise, the advertisements Dali did make are certainly wonderful to look at and wild to watch, but I think they’re some of his worst work, from a quality standpoint.